Sustainable Urban Systems to Transfer Achievable Implementation Network

The main activity of the network will be to run a series of workshops in which research projects will be defined and developed. There will be a series of eight workshops, designed as four pairs of workshops in which the research team comes together to develop a specific research proposal. Each proposal will be developed along the lines of the 'Sandpit' Ideas factory concept in the first workshop of a pair, followed by detailed generation of one or more proposals which are finalised in the second workshop of the pair. Each workshop would be supplemented with tele/videoconferences as necessary to facilitate detailed generation of the research proposals, including the inclusion of industrial and entrepreneurial inputs. Submission of the proposal to the appropriate funding body would normally take place shortly after the second workshop. Thus over the two years of the Network, a minimum of four strong research proposals would be developed to meet all of the research elements outlined above. The workshops will take place in Shanghai, Australia, Hong Kong and the UK, two in each location.The subject matter for each workshop will be worked out in detail by the network team under the leadership of the Lead Academics in each case. However, the broad topics of energy, water, transport and planning will be covered in each proposal, taking the two major overarching themes of behavioural change and systems thinking as the main drivers in each case. Each of the UK academics will be responsible for one workshop together with an appropriate Chinese academic and this will give a slightly different flavour to the four proposals, although the basic message of understanding behavioural change and holistic thinking will be achieved in all of them. Each workshop will be coordinated by the two lead academics, with the Network Administrator providing the administrative backup. Local arrangements will be made by the local network member with backup from the network administrator and lead academics.The workshops provide excellent opportunities for the collaborating partners to join with local people / including local industry, politicians/government officials, schools, universities etc / in learning, research and dissemination activities about sustainable development, the Dongtan project and other more specific issues being raised by the team. This provides an excellent opportunity for the team to engage with local people and to hear their concerns about the issues which are exercising the minds of the researchers in the team and thus to consider importing these into the subsequent proposals. The excitement of this is that because of the way the network will work, we have an opportunity to obtain a very multicultural and diverse view of attitudes to change through active local participation during the workshops in each city visited by the workshops. In this way we will be able to include in our considerations of behavioural attitudes to change, inputs from China, Hong Kong, Australia and the UK and thus into the conceptual models for change management that the future research will be developing.